from the yeah-that'll-work dept

For well over a decade, we've written about the rise of diploma mills online. These are generally unaccredited operations that effectively sell you a degree so you can pretend to be more qualified than you really are. Every few years or so, there are big stories about some semi-famous/high-level person whose degree actually came from a diploma mill. Over the weekend, the NY Times exposed a large Pakistani "software" company, Axact, for not only being behind a bunch of diploma mill websites, but also for engaging in heavy handed boiler-room-style tactics to pressure people into paying ridiculous sums of money. The NY Times report is pretty damning, highlighting how Axact has become a big name in Pakistan, but very few people actually understand how or why it's become so successful. The company has done a lot to try to hide the nature of its large diploma mill business. As the NY Times shows, a bunch of the biggest bogus diploma mill sites are really run by Axact, and feature stock imagery, videos of students/administrators who are really actors (some of whom appear in videos for multiple such universities) and websites and names that make them appear kinda sorta like well-known universities. For example, some of the fake sites named are "Columbiana" and "Barkley University."

The whole NY Times article is absolutely worth reading, but here's a snippet demonstrating what's going on here:

Many sites link to the same fictitious accreditation bodies and have identical graphics, such as a floating green window with an image of a headset-wearing woman who invites customers to chat.

There are technical commonalities, too: identical blocks of customized coding, and the fact that a vast majority route their traffic through two computer servers run by companies registered in Cyprus and Latvia.

Five former employees confirmed many of these sites as in-house creations of Axact, where executives treat the online schools as lucrative brands to be meticulously created and forcefully marketed, frequently through deception.

The sources described how employees would plant fictitious reports about Axact universities on iReport, a section of the CNN website for citizen journalism. Although CNN stresses that it has not verified the reports, Axact uses the CNN logo as a publicity tool on many of its sites.

Social media adds a further patina of legitimacy. LinkedIn contains profiles for purported faculty members of Axact universities, like Christina Gardener, described as a senior consultant at Hillford University and a former vice president at Southwestern Energy, a publicly listed company in Houston. In an email, a Southwestern spokeswoman said the company had no record of an employee with that name.

The heart of Axact’s business, however, is the sales team — young and well-educated Pakistanis, fluent in English or Arabic, who work the phones with customers who have been drawn in by the websites. They offer everything from high school diplomas for about $350, to doctoral degrees for $4,000 and above.

Elsewhere in the article, it notes that there have been scandals about some of the diploma mills in question, but Axact has been quite careful to keep its own name out of such conversations, often with legal threats:

Axact has brandished legal threats to dissuade reporters, rivals and critics. Under pressure from Axact, a major British paper, The Mail on Sunday, withdrew an article from the Internet in 2006. Later, using an apparently fictitious law firm, the company faced down a consumer rights group in Botswana that had criticized Axact-run Headway University.

It has also petitioned a court in the United States, bringing a lawsuit in 2007 against an American company that is a competitor in the essay-writing business, Student Network Resources, and that had called Axact a “foreign scam site.” The American company countersued and was awarded $700,000, but no damages have been paid, the company’s lawyer said.

The article also notes that when a class action lawsuit was filed a few years ago against two Axact diploma mills (Belford High School and Belford University), some guy in Pakistan named "Salem Kureshi" claimed that he was running the websites:

But instead of Axact, the defendant who stepped forward was Salem Kureshi, a Pakistani who claimed to be running the websites from his apartment. Over three years of hearings, his only appearance was in a video deposition from a dimly lit room in Karachi, during which he was barely identifiable. An associate who also testified by video, under the name “John Smith,” wore sunglasses.

Mr. Kureshi’s legal fees of over $400,000 were paid to his American lawyers through cash transfers from different currency exchange stores in Dubai, court documents show. Recently a reporter was unable to find his given address in Karachi.

“We were dealing with an elusive and illusory defendant,” said Mr. Howlett, the lawyer for the plaintiffs.

In his testimony, Mr. Kureshi denied any links to Axact, even though mailboxes operated by the Belford schools listed the company’s headquarters as their forwarding address.

The lawsuit ended in 2012 when a federal judge ordered Mr. Kureshi and Belford to pay $22.7 million in damages. None of the damages have been paid, Mr. Howlett said.

True to form, the company has gone ballistic in response to the NY Times article, posting an angry threatening rant on its website, claiming that the story is "defamatory" and promising a legal response. The response is... an interesting read as well. It basically tries to smear everyone associated with the article, arguing that it's all some anti-Pakistan plot. It focuses on the claim that the NY Times is partnered with a company that is a competitor to Axact's new plans to create a new media giant named Bol.

The story is authored by some reporter Declan Walsh of NYT who was expelled from Pakistan as Persona non-grata by Pakistan Interior Ministry allegedly due to his involvement in damaging Pakistan’s national interests. Even the media group he is affiliated with, the Express Tribune, published a story against him (click here to read more). Several other organizations have also written about him as well as failure of NYT to deliver credible news (click here to read more). This reporter has worked and devised a one-sided story without taking any input from the company. A last-minute, haphazard elusive email was sent to the company demanding an immediate response by the next day to which the attorney for Axact responded. Click here to view the response.

Moreover, this reporter has not mentioned the conflict of interest which the NYT has due to its association with Express Media as its revenue source in Pakistan. This necessary disclosure regarding the criminal cases on NYT Partner in Pakistan was deliberately omitted and is an injustice to the reader not expected of a publication like NYT.

But it's not just the NY Times that Axact has been apparently threatening. Axact proudly trumpets on its website that "truth prevails" as Forbes was pressured into removing a story about the NY Times story. Indeed, a Google search suggests that Forbes had such a story yesterday, but if you click on the link to a story by James Marshall Crotty, it now takes you nowhere.

Separately, a new NY Times report notes that Axact has threatened a Pakistani blog for merely collecting a bunch of tweets that were mocking Axact. You can see the post on Pak Tea House here, as well as its post about the threat letter from Axact. The blog does not appear interested in giving in, noting that "this is against the principles of free speech." As it further points out, "if the company is aggrieved it should present counter-facts and prove that NYT story is wrong," rather than bullying the blog for merely posting tweets of people responding to the NY Times story.

Lashing out with claims of defamation, rather than actually responding to the details in the story, is only going to increase the attention on Axact. One gets the feeling this story is far from over...

Update: Oh, and the Pakistani government has now raided the offices of Axact and arrested a bunch of employees, in response to the NY Times' story.

from the making-it-up-as-we-go-along dept

For quite some time now, there have been serious questions about how how the US was able to track down Osama bin Laden's "hiding place" to send in special forces to kill him. The story many people have heard was that the CIA was able to identify the "courier" who was used to help bin Laden communicate with the outside world, and then used that info to figure out where he was. And, a big part of that story -- especially as immortalized in the movie Zero Dark Thirty -- was that the CIA's torture program was instrumental in revealing that information. However, even before the big Senate Intelligence Committee study on the torture program was released, it was revealed that the torture program had nothing to do with identifying the courier, known as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.

However, as you may have heard over the weekend, Seymour Hersh published a somewhat epic story, arguing that almost everything about the bin Laden killing was a lie, and a bunch of stories -- including everything about al-Kuwaiti -- were made up after the fact. Hersh's story is well worth reading (as are some of the criticisms of it that question some of the details). But one key aspect of the report is that finding a courier had absolutely nothing to do with finding bin Laden. Instead, it was a so-called "walk in" -- a Pakistani intelligence official who knew that Pakistan already had captured bin Laden -- who reached out to the US, seeking the $25 million reward for information leading to bin Laden's whereabouts.

In other words, even the Senate's torture report gets the story wrong completely. In the Senate report, the identifying of al-Kuwaiti came from traditional interrogation, rather than the torture part. The CIA's response was basically that it was the torture part (the bad cop) that enabled the information to come out separately (good cop). But Hersh's report says the whole courier story is made up whole cloth. While some have questioned the details of Hersh's report, there's now independent verification from other sources to NBC that bin Laden was actually found via a "walk-in," rather than the courier (warning: stupid NBC autoplay video at that link).

In Hersh's version, the plan had been to kill bin Laden, and later (perhaps weeks later) come up with a story saying bin Laden had been killed by a drone strike. A few things went wrong -- including one of the US helicopters famously crashing, and there was enough buzz that the US rushed to publicly announce the killing, including Obama's famous speech that, apparently, created havoc since it messed up a bunch of previously agreed to things about how the killing would be presented, and was done without first clearing it with the intelligence community. This resulted in the CIA being rushed in to concoct some cover stories, and some CIA officials quickly realized that this would be a fantastic way to pretend that torture had been useful:

Gates also objected to the idea, pushed by Brennan and Leon Panetta, that US intelligence had learned of bin Laden’s whereabouts from information acquired by waterboarding and other forms of torture. ‘All of this is going on as the Seals are flying home from their mission. The agency guys know the whole story,’ the retired official said. ‘It was a group of annuitants who did it.’ (Annuitants are retired CIA officers who remain active on contract.) ‘They had been called in by some of the mission planners in the agency to help with the cover story. So the old-timers come in and say why not admit that we got some of the information about bin Laden from enhanced interrogation?’ At the time, there was still talk in Washington about the possible prosecution of CIA agents who had conducted torture.

‘Gates told them this was not going to work,’ the retired official said. ‘He was never on the team. He knew at the eleventh hour of his career not to be a party to this nonsense. But State, the agency and the Pentagon had bought in on the cover story. None of the Seals thought that Obama was going to get on national TV and announce the raid. The Special Forces command was apoplectic. They prided themselves on keeping operational security.’ There was fear in Special Operations, the retired official said, that ‘if the true story of the missions leaked out, the White House bureaucracy was going to blame it on the Seals.’

In Hersh's version of the story... the courier never even existed (bin Laden was actually pretty cut off from everything). He also notes that there was no firefight at the compound, since the Pakistanis had planned out the whole thing and made sure that no one was guarding bin Laden. But the US made up the idea of a firefight so that it could "kill off" the courier, al-Kuwaiti, who never really existed:

There was another reason to claim there had been a firefight inside the compound, the retired official said: to avoid the inevitable question that would arise from an uncontested assault. Where were bin Laden’s guards? Surely, the most sought-after terrorist in the world would have around-the-clock protection. ‘And one of those killed had to be the courier, because he didn’t exist and we couldn’t produce him. The Pakistanis had no choice but to play along with it.’

In other words, if true, not only did the torture not produce the courier, there was no courier at all. And the whole debate about whether or not Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Hassan Ghul gave up information on al-Kuwaiti during torture efforts or during regular interrogations is entirely meaningless. The whole thing was fiction, invented after the fact. For what it's worth, there were other stories concerning the torture program that seem equally bizarre in retrospect, if Hersh's story is true. Take this Daily Beast article about al-Kuwaiti, in which it claims that one guy was interrogated, and denied ever hearing of al-Kuwaiti:

Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, detainees told CIA interrogators about an especially important courier who went by the name Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti. A series of subsequent interrogations, including one of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, confirmed the courier's importance. In 2004, al Qaeda operative Hassan Ghul revealed that the courier was close to Faraj al-Libi, who replaced Mohammed as al Qaeda's operational commander after Mohammed's arrest. A year later, al-Libi himself was captured, and he protested so adamantly that he'd never heard of al-Kuwaiti that the CIA took it as further evidence that he was their man.

Either way, the idea that torture had anything to do with anything is growing progressively weaker... and yet, we still have people defending the torture program, and no one is ever likely to be punished legally for it.

from the more-like-a-list-of-'it-would-be-nice-if...'-requests dept

Extrajudicial killing by pilotless air strikes is just something our government does now. Weaponized drones are sent out to eliminate enemies of the United States, supposedly under the guidance of the Dept. of Justice and some presidential policy directives. But the rules aren't rules. They appear to be set in stone when the legal authority behind these drone strikes is questioned. But they're much more fluid when they "need" to be... like, say, after a drone strike takes out more than its intended target. [h/t Chris Soghoian]

Last week, Mr. Obama apologized for the killings and took personal responsibility for the mistake. He called the operation “fully consistent with the guidelines under which we conduct counterterrorism efforts in the region...”

But what guidelines? Certainly not those that supposedly govern these strikes. According to those guidelines, the target must be determined to be an "imminent threat" before the strike can be authorized. EXCEPT:

President Barack Obama tightened rules for the U.S. drone program in 2013, but he secretly approved a waiver giving the Central Intelligence Agency more flexibility in Pakistan than anywhere else to strike suspected militants, according to current and former U.S. officials.

These rules were in place to prevent exactly what occurred in this drone strike: civilian casualties. In Pakistan, this condition does not apply. So, rather than have the CIA hold off until it had gathered more intelligence, the strike was carried out at the agency's discretion.

Obama apparently issued a Presidential Policy Directive on drone strikes in 2013. Whatever it changed in the existing policies has yet to be implemented. It certainly didn't revoke the CIA's Pakistan pass. Rules don't apply in that country's borders. And there's no way of telling if the similar waiver exempting Iraq and Syria has been withdrawn.

The DOJ's drone strike memo says targets must present a "continued" and "imminent" threat. This wording alone ensures only minimal investigative standards need to be met before authorizing a drone strike in any country the US currently has a military presence. (Or adjacent to that country…) Because troops may be targeted by terrorist groups, any suspected terrorists in the area can be considered "imminent threats" simply because of their proximity -- not their actions.

This language -- along with multiple administrative waivers -- has turned drone strikes into something performed almost exclusively at the CIA's discretion. Sure, there's some oversight of the program, but like a majority of US intelligence oversight, it's mainly words rather than deeds.

About once a month, staff members of the congressional intelligence committees drive across the Potomac River to C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., and watch videos of people being blown up.

As part of the macabre ritual the staff members look at the footage of drone strikes in Pakistan and other countries and a sampling of the intelligence buttressing each strike, but not the internal C.I.A. cables discussing the attacks and their aftermath.

So, the CIA holds a monthly snuff filmfest for intelligence oversight committees. Figuring moving pictures are worth thousands of words, it then withholds the thousands of words justifying its decision to carry out a strike. Despite this process being clearly aimed at minimizing objections and questions, intelligence committee heads still offer their support of the program and the agency running it, even when they clearly don't trust the CIA on other issues.

When Ms. Feinstein was asked in a meeting with reporters in 2013 why she was so sure she was getting the truth about the drone program while she accused the C.I.A. of lying to her about torture, she seemed surprised.

“That’s a good question, actually,” she said.

Cognitive dissonance has long been a feature of intelligence committee leadership. Sen. Feinstein has now done this twice -- the other time being her outrage over the CIA spying on her staffers, while simultaneously offering her support for NSA programs that performed similar functions.

The CIA holds an extreme amount of power, one that can be used carelessly and/or thoroughly abused. And no one -- at any level of government -- has done anything more than encourage it to handle drone strikes as it sees fit. And all the while, the rules continue to shift, molding themselves to each situation, often applying retroactive forgiveness for legally-questionable strikes.

from the we-only-ask-for-the-impossible dept

As more countries enforce their local laws on offensive content, the Chilling Effects takedown clearinghouse is becoming a strange place to hang out. Russia's Roskomnadzor has been particularly active, targeting Twitter users and bloggers who post anything that violates that entity's sensibilities -- most of which seems to be related to drug use or suicide. The UK's elastic defamation laws have led to several requests for content removal, some of which are requested without any court decision in the requester's favor. The new EU court decision ordering Google to "forget" certain links will undoubtedly see an influx of whitewashing requests in the near future.

The unethical tweets request targets accounts well out of its jurisdiction -- three accounts run by adult performers (all links NSFW-ish). Of these three, only one remains live -- possibly because she is a resident of the United States (and incredibly famous). The other two are suspended, but a cache inspection seems to indicate these are not of Pakistani origin.

But things go from merely annoying to truly bizarre when we get to the supposedly "blasphemous URL." The following seems to indicate the PTA really has very little idea how Twitter -- and the internet itself -- works. (link NSFW -- gore, death, nudity.)

Needless to say, the URL is still live. And will always be. You can't ask for the removal of a URL that performs an action that has dynamic results. You can't even ask to have every result returned to be removed unless you're willing to copy down each offending URL. Burning the Quran may be a blasphemous act (according to the PTA) but these search results aren't going anywhere. (This isn't an isolated incident. This one asks for the removal of a Twitter searches for photos of drawings of Muhammad as well as for the term "draw Muhammad day".)

The PTA could just not perform that search and save itself from witnessing blasphemy, and it would have more of an effect than petitioning Twitter to do something it can't actually do. The same goes for the three "unethical" accounts. No one's forcing anyone to visit those and someone working for the PTA has to spend a great deal of time viewing the religiously-unviewable in order to find something to complain about.

For me, the troubling thing about Twitter’s selective content-blocking tool is that, like Google’s selective adjusting of the borders between countries based on where the user is located, it almost makes censorship too easy — just another feature box that can be checked — and that encourages governments like those in Turkey and Pakistan to use it for anything that seems even remotely offensive or irritating, a list that seems to grow by the day.

By selectively removing that content or changing the borders on maps for certain users, the world becomes a little less open, without most people even realizing that it is happening. [...] [M]aking censorship easier shouldn’t be the goal, I don’t think.

These requests are coming from a government entity that temporarily lifted a YouTube ban for three minutes before slamming that door shut once it realized blasphemous content was still available. This government has also blocked/banned Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, Bing, MSN, Amazon and any form of encryption. It seems almost redundant to be surfing Twitter for porn star accounts and pictures of burned books when it can just cut off the site entirely.

But this is what you get when you let government and religion freely intertwine -- lots and lots of outrage and very little common sense.

from the seems-important dept

Oh, vaccines. Sure, here in the US we're dealing with the return of diseases like measles, mumps and whooping cough due to people who are very confused about how vaccines work. But the big news last week on the vaccine front has to be the return of polio, which has freaked out the World Health Organization, who declared it a public health emergency.

The return of polio is also due to an ill-informed anti-vaccine campaign -- not one driven by people confused by a fraudulent study, but rather by the Taliban. Many of the new cases are in Pakistan and a variety of nearby countries. The Taliban has been arguing for a while that vaccinations and vaccination drives are really efforts by western intelligence and/or imperialism.

The problem is: the CIA basically confirmed that for them by using a fake vaccination campaign to find Osama bin Laden a few years ago. Suddenly, crazy rumors about vaccination programs simply being fronts for the US intelligence community weren't just more reasonable, they were flat out confirmed. And, soon after that was all revealed, suddenly the rates of polio shot up? Right around the same time that polio vaccination workers started getting killed in Pakistan?

We see this same sort of thing from the US intelligence community all the time. It never seems to do any sort of realistic cost-benefit analysis, assuming that it needs to "find the bad guys at all costs." But some of those "costs" can be immense. Bringing back the threat of polio around the globe is a massive cost. Yes, bin Laden was a very bad person, but was it worth bringing back a polio epidemic?

from the guys-trying-to-kill-them dept

We've definitely seen musicians overreact to the threat of infringement in all sorts of bizarre ways, but this may be the most extreme. Some Pashtun musicians in Pakistan are now claiming that piracy is worse than the Taliban -- and that includes a musician who the Taliban tried to kill. This is, of course, crazy. The Taliban, somewhat famously, has banned music in places where they are in control. In fact, just a few months ago, the WSJ had a big article explaining how the Taliban was directly targeting and silencing Pashtun musicians. It explains the real reasons for the problems for Pashtun musicians:

For centuries, Pashto musicians such as Mr. Alam were based in Dabgari Bazaar in Peshawar's ancient, walled inner city. Music shops lined the top floors of old two-story buildings with wooden balconies. The ground floors housed merchants who sold household material such as woven beds and embroidered cushions for newlyweds.

"The place was full of music shops—it was like a packed train," said 72-year-old Ustad Ahmad Gul. A musical prodigy who recorded his first tracks for Radio Pakistan when he was 8 years old, Mr. Gul had a shop in Dabgari for 18 years.

But amid the new climate of intolerance, the neighborhood's residents took the initiative to start expelling the musicians from Dabgari in 2004, said Mohamaed Ershad, an elderly shopkeeper there who sells cotton.

The musicians "had changed—they were no longer the old respected artists," complained Mr. Ershad, who at the time had rented his top floor to a musician. "There was dancing here."

When the musicians resisted leaving Dabgari, shops were set on fire and musical instruments flung to the streets. Police also barged into Nishtar Hall, the city's premium space for performing arts, during a concert and kicked the microphones as a live audience watched.

So, forgive me for thinking that, perhaps, the Taliban is a hell of a lot more responsible for the problems of Pashtun musicians than "digital piracy." And yet, that's not what people in the article linked above are claiming.

Yousafzai, 44, has invested his life in Pashtun music, which is known for both its stirring and calming melodies as well as its emotive folk songs.
In 2008, he survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban in his hometown of Malakand. But now he maintains that the militant group which considers music and entertainment un-Islamic is the least of his worries.

I have no doubt that it's difficult to be a Pashtun musician these days, but to blame it on piracy seems ridiculous given the circumstances. Even if there has been an increase in piracy, it seems that much of that is likely because of the Taliban going around, killing people for dancing and threatening to blow up music stores if they don't close down.

I recognize that "piracy" is an easy scapegoat, but it hardly seems like the appropriate one in Pakistan.

Of course, guess who is helping to spread the myth that Pakistaini piracy is the problem? Why, it's the US government, of course, in the form of the USTR! In its latest Special 301 report, it complains that Pakistan hasn't cracked down on piracy, and that its law enforcement should have more power to go after pirates even when the rightsholder isn't complaining.

Widespread counterfeiting and piracy, particularly book and optical disc piracy, continue to present serious
concerns for U.S. industry. Pakistan should ensure that its enforcement officials can exercise ex
officio authority without the need for a formal complaint by a rights holder, and should provide
for deterrent-level penalties for criminal IPR infringement. Pakistan should also take the
necessary steps to reform its copyright law to address the piracy challenges of the digital age.

Again, of course, if the US hadn't been so instrumental in helping the Taliban become more powerful in Pakistan over the last decade and a half, perhaps more music stores would have remained open and piracy wouldn't be such a big deal. But, no, of course the answer must be to push for stricter copyright laws. I'm sure that's a major priority for the Pakistani government right now...

Just the fact that this bizarre article claiming piracy is worse than the Taliban is coming out right at the same time as the Special 301 effort raises questions. It certainly sounds like the start of a concerted campaign to push for stricter copyright laws in a country that should be focusing on a lot of other things right now.

The United States built Twitter-like social media programs in Afghanistan and Pakistan, like one in Cuba, that were aimed at encouraging open political discussion, Obama administration officials said Friday. But like the program in Cuba, which was widely ridiculed when it became public this month, the services in Pakistan and Afghanistan shut down after they ran out of money because the administration could not make them self-sustaining.

In all three cases, American officials appeared to lack a long-term strategy for the programs beyond providing money to start them.

Administration officials also said Friday that there had been similar programs in dozens of other countries, including a Yes Youth Can project in Kenya that was still active.

While you can see the appeal of better helping citizens in these countries communicate with each other, the secrecy concerning who is behind them is where it gets troubling. As the case in Cuba with ZunZuneo, we noted that this helps legitimize every crackpot theory about how various programs are really US government fronts.

In fact, as you read the details of these programs, many of them do appear to have been set up with perfectly noble intentions, to help people better communicate and share ideas. But having the US government behind them -- especially given all of the recent revelations about US surveillance -- completely undermines that intent. Furthermore, it really doesn't seem like any of these services have had much of an impact at all. Instead, in all of the cases where we've heard of social networking services having any impact, they're when citizens of a country adopt existing services, like Twitter and Facebook, rather than these specialized "local" services.

from the oh,-look,-another-one dept

The government of Pakistan is proposing a new law that significantly threatens privacy rights, in a blatant attempt to establish a legal regime containing broad powers when it comes to obtaining, retaining, and sharing data obtained through criminal investigations, including communications data.

The Privacy International post quoted above goes on to spell out the details of the proposed Pakistani law. Naturally, there's data retention to obtain the data. The new law:

would require a service provider, which is defined in broad terms, to "within its technical capability, retain its traffic data minimum for a period of ninety days" (a requirement may already be in place under the Electronic Transaction Ordinance, 2002). The definition of traffic data includes information "indicating the communication's origin, destination, route, time, data, size, duration or type of underlying service".

But alongside this affirmation of older powers, there are plenty of new ones setting out some of the things the Pakistani government can do with data it acquires:

The draft law contains a troubling provision that would allow the Federal Government of Pakistan to forward information obtained from investigations under the Act to foreign agencies or international agencies. A prior request from the foreign entity would not be required to exercise this power.

Presumably this will allow Pakistan to offer to swap data with the security agencies of other nations in order to obtain information on people of interest. And as Privacy International points out, once it's gone, it's gone:

The information at stake is expansive: "text, message, data, voice, sound, database, video, signals, software, computer programs, codes including object code and source code". The information shared could include particular sensitive information about individuals or large quantities of data involving significant numbers of people. Once this information has left the hands of the Federal Government, it would no longer be subject to national law and could be used by foreign entities as they see fit.

The new law would also authorize data-flows in the other direction:

Another section, on "trans-border access", would permit the Federal Government or investigation agency to access data that may be "located in a foreign country or territory, if it obtains the lawful and voluntary consent of the person who has the lawful authority to disclose it". This could include personal data held by foreign corporations. This opens up the possibility of abuse, as "trans-border access" could be used to circumvent the safeguards established in other parts of the draft law.

It's easy to see how global companies like Google and Facebook might be persuaded that it would be in their best interests -- if they wish to continue to operate in Pakistan -- to hand over information about their users, stored outside the country's borders. And of course, once some or all of this proposed law is passed, other countries will feel even more entitled to follow suit.

from the just-a-game dept

It's becoming something of a trend for Pakistan to ban and/or boycott things it doesn't like. It should be noted, of course, that different cultures have different levels of sensitivity about different subjects, but that doesn't mean we can't point out where we think they've got things wrong. Banning YouTube, for instance, is a head in the sand approach that just won't work. Getting into the business of monitoring all of your citizen's communications with foreigners and banning encryption is even more chilling. And it isn't just the Pakistani government getting into the act, either. Recall that one of their citizens called for the death penalty on the founders of Facebook due to some contest a Facebook user ran. So, while I'm all for cultural sensitivity, it shouldn't be expected in arenas where that sensitivity is not reciprocated.

Both Medal of Honor: Warfighter and Call of Duty: Black Ops II are first-person shooter games, where players take on the persona of an American special forces agent and feature ultra realistic graphics. Terrorism and the role of local security forces are hugely sensitive subjects in Pakistan, which has barely recovered from the shock of discovering that Osama bin Laden was hiding in plain sight, barely 30 miles from the capital Islamabad.

I'll leave the politics aside here, but it takes a special kind of awesome to be in nearly un-recoverable shock that bin Laden was hiding in your country when most of the world's media was suggesting as much for something like a decade. That he hid so easily near the nation's capital in a complex that was just begging to be investigated at the very least opens up the door for creative interpretations for how that might have happened. And that's exactly what the two games in question offer up as a fictional plotline. For example:

The latest installment of the Medal of Honor series opens with American Navy Seals coming ashore in Karachi docks on a mission to destroy a black market arms shipment. But when their detonation sets off a second, bigger explosion they realise they have stumbled on a much bigger terrorist plot, sparking a global manhunt. A chaotic car chase through the city follows amid warnings that the ISI - Pakistan's intelligence agency - is on the way.

Mr Memon added there was a danger children would be brainwashed into thinking foreign agents were at war inside Karachi, possibly leading them into the arms of militants.

In other words, the game has a plot that involves Pakistani intelligence cooperating with terrorists. That's a possibility about as shocking as, oh, say bin Laden hiding a paper airplane's throw away from Pakistan's capital. But the point is that it's a fictional plot. Fighting against it is silly. You might as well outlaw the Narnia books, because wardrobe-makers are insulted that any of their products could transport folks to witch-infested worlds ruled by multi-syllabic lions. What possible explanation could Mr. Memon have for this call to boycott?

"These games show a misleading idea of what is happening in the city. You don't get the CIA all the way through Grand Theft Auto," he said.

Quite true. On the other hand, no American stores in New York, Vegas, or L.A. are calling for a boycott of the GTA games because their cities are shown to be infested with shotgun wielding caricatures of Western culture. Because it's fiction.

from the targeted-blocking-software-fails-to-block-main-target dept

Pakistan's love/hate relationship with the internet seems to be mostly "hate" these days. Over the past couple of years, the Pakistani government has done as much as it can to cripple local access to the web, including seeking a nationwide web filtering system that would block off access to 50 million websites.

More recently, it joined a variety of nations which imposed a Youtube ban (or at least complained loudly and violently) because of Google's refusal to block or remove the "Innocence of the Muslims" video. Reacting to violent protests, Pakistan cut off Youtube, much to the dismay of its estimated 25 million internet users.

A ban on YouTube, which Pakistan imposed after an anti-Islam video caused riots in much of the Muslim world, was lifted Saturday, only to be reinstated — after three minutes — when it was discovered that blasphemous material was still available on the site.

Much to the censor's dismay, the offending video remained just where the uploader had left it. The government stated it had "taken steps" to block offending content, but somehow the very thing that had prompted the shutdown had eluded the blockade, putting Muhammed directly in the path of badly-dubbed criticism.

The Nation’s report gave a sense of how famous Mr. Nazir managed to become, despite the ban on the video-sharing site in his home country: “Around 250 people, including local politicians met him at the airport, showering him with rose petals and chanting ‘Long Live One Pound Fish!’ while TV networks interrupted coverage of the fifth anniversary of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s assassination to show his return live.”

Of course, that's the danger of blocking or taking down content viewed as dangerous, blasphemous, heretical or just plain infringing -- very often, legitimate, non-dangerous, non-offensive content gets caught in the sticky webs of overreaching entities.

I suppose the government has to be grateful that this past weekend's up-and-down action managed to leave the rest of the internet intact. It has to be tough living down a surreptitious Youtube blockade that manages to kill your own country's internet service while blocking the Youtube connection of a handful of unrelated (except by ISP) countries.